The Internet has made it possible for people to connect and share information globally in ways previously undreamt of. Social media platforms, for example, enable people on opposite sides of the world to collaborate on ideas, discuss current events, or simply share what they had for lunch. The amount of content generated through such social media technologies and the load on these systems are staggering. It is common for social media providers to operate databases with petabytes of media items, while leading providers are already looking toward technology to handle exabytes of data. Furthermore, millions of users across the globe enjoy the ability to simultaneously interact with content on social media websites. One popular social media website, for example, has over a billion active users that spend a total of over ten million hours each month interacting with the website. These users can often produce hundreds of millions of content posts each day. When users access such websites, the social media website can select content such as other users' posts, news feeds, event notifications, and advertisements to display to the users.
Despite this complexity, the transition from one page to the next within a social networking website appears simple to end users, and unless this page retrieval process occurs with no perceptible delays, users may lose patience and simply navigate to a different website. In addition, providing content that users find relevant increases the chances that users will interact with those content items and that they will return to the website in the future. For example, being able provide quick and accurate translations of content originally written in a different source language increases users access to both content and other users, and thus their overall enjoyment of a social media system.
The techniques introduced here may be better understood by referring to the following Detailed Description in conjunction with the accompanying drawings, in which like reference numerals indicate identical or functionally similar elements.